The Creations And Inspirations Of An Intuitive Artist

Archive for October, 2013

It’s been a funky kind of week but anything but quiet. Piece by piece I have been building my Indiemade website, more news of which will follow shortly once I have some items up for sale on there and recent work to show off.

Little progress has been made on my Journal Fodder exploration though I still want to complete it by the end of the year, how feasible that is is still in question but it’s what I’m aiming for and I’m just over halfway through the book.

Last week I discovered my bank card had been canceled as it had been compromised and the fraud department of my bank notified by the police. While a pain to sort out nothing was taken from my account and my bank got it sorted extremely quickly for me which I am very grateful for.

It’s half term this week so the kidlets are home with me making work difficult. It doesn’t help that my eldest’s homework is to build a model Tudor house. Her teacher sent home an instruction sheet and I can tell you now it’s not the simplest project in the world so a lot of my time has been thrust into making the model happen. We also have an assortment of Samhain activities going on as I teach the kidlets about my view of this time of the year, how and why I mark and celebrate it and what it means to me.

To cap the week off NaNoWriMo is fast approaching and while I probably have enough on my plate as it is I seem to be a glutton for punishment and have another goal I desperately want to complete before the year is out. That is to finish the first draft of the novel I have been working on. NaNo is the perfect opportunity for this i think and my best chance of completing it before the New Year. Whether or not I reach the 50,000 word goal I don’t really mind as long as I get my first draft finished ready for editing and re-writing next year.

A busy week that has just flown by and left me wondering both what happened to it and where all my energy went, still with the kidlets going back to school next week things will be back to some semblance of normality…I hope.

Communication with our inner selves, this was the theme of the next Journal Fodder prompt and one that I loved unlike the last one. We all know how important communication with those around us is for healthy, happy relationships. Poor communication brings nothing but confusion, hurt and unhappiness, so why is it that so many of us have such difficulty with self communication? Have we just lost the art of it or is it sheer laziness on our parts.

The best and most truthful insights I receive come from myself during moments of meditation and reflection. This doesn’t have to happen while sitting and specifically meditating. I know when I suggest this course of action a lot of people balk and tell me they can’t motivate, that it doesn’t work for them, that it’s too hard, but there are ways around this. There are other ways to encourage that link to our inner selves and gain it’s wisdom as long as we are open to listening. The more we ignore what we tell ourselves the quieter that voice becomes until we forget it is even there.

Any repetitive action can help us make this contact, walking is excellent or jobs like washing up can allow our minds to relax and wander, but we have to listen, really listen, and take heed of what our inner selves tell us. How important is self communication? In my opinion very important, it may not be easy at first and we may hear things we don’t want to hear but they are the things we need to hear and address to move into happiness and find peace.

The last couple of Journal Fodder prompts I had real difficulty with, they were about people, the people that encourage and support and the people that challenge and destroy in our lives. I found this a real challenge to go through and painful, not for the first half of the spread dealing with the ‘angels’ in my life but the second half brought about a lot of memories and issues for me to think about and deal with.

It wasn’t until I had long finished the page that I really pinpointed the people in my past that had the greatest negative effect on my life and work. I find it easier to recognise them now, I get this feeling, like struggling my way through deep mud when I come across them but the ones from my past are still with me and still having an effect on my creativity.

I think you can tell by the right hand page, how sapped I was going through this mentally, how the page just doesn’t feel right. It tells me that this is a real issue I need to work through, one by one I need to deal with the feelings I have about these people and the effect they have had on my life. It’s not easy but it’s a starting point.

Aside from this it has been a busy week, much of what I’ve been doing being computer based as I build my website through Indiemade. I hope to have it up and running with products to sell by the end of the month though more will come about that soon.

We all, as creative people, know that feeling. Where nothing flows, no ideas seem to take hold and beg to be given life, no thoughts insist on being written, no images scream to be captured. All too often we blame our muses, I know I do, though whether this is true or a defensive technique I don’t know. What I do know is that being blocked is something we can work through to find balance and happiness creatively.

It’s easier said than done though, “you’re not good enough”, “call that a painting?” and “you’ll never make it” are all things my gremlins tell me to keep me blocked. The longer I leave it the worse it gets until suddenly a day has become a week, usually my lack of creativity has me feeling terrible mentally which brings out a sluggishness in me physically and I am believing the gremlin because it’s easy to do.

Creativity makes my heart sing, it makes me happy and yet I revel in allowing myself to remain in a place where I am unhappy.

I have spent a lot of time this last few months creating things that don’t make me happy because I believed the gremlin that constantly told me I couldn’t paint and do what I love, that it wasn’t wanted or commercial enough. I’m not ashamed to say I have these bouts of lacking self confidence, we all do at some point over some area of our life, the trick is to push through them because only by doing that thing we think we can’t do do we realise that we actually can do it.

I accept I need to create, more than that, I need to paint and I make the commitment to doing a little every day. It doesn’t matter what the quality is like just that something gets painted and I give it, whatever it is, a voice.

Sometimes, accepting ourselves entirely is hard. We have this knack of being mean, critical and judgemental towards ourselves but it’s important to accept all the facets to our personality to find happiness. Each one of us is a beautiful individual who has to carve our own path through life.

My word for October is accept, not only for my self acceptance but as a reminder of how important it is to accept the things around us as well. My work often doesn’t go according to plan, sometimes i make things I don’t like and I have to accept it, sometimes situations are out of our control and all we can do is wait and ride it out. Sometimes the people we love make choices that we don’t want them to make, sometimes it rains when we need sun. Rather than stress out the best thing we can do is accept what is happening and move alongside it on the path of least resistance.